Plans for the outdoor planting at the farm are progressing. We will likely plant the flower garden in front of the greenhouse in May, with a beautiful array of flowering perennials to bring in pollinators and other beneficial insects, and to cut and sell as bouquets. We will also tuck in annual flowers that we can start from seed, like cosmos and sunflowers, and edible flowers, like calendula and pansies. This a a passionflower vining up a trellis in the greenhouse.
We will next plant the orchard behind, to the north of, the greenhouse. We have received pears, apples, currants, and gooseberries as bare roots, and potted them up in 5 gallon pots to nurture a bit longer in the greenhouse. They all came in looking great, and have mostly started leafing out already.
Under the trees, we will plant fruiting shrubs, and under and around those, we will plant more annual and perennial flowers and perhaps some vegetables, too. This area was cover-cropped with nitrogen-fixing clover, and rye, last year to help keep weeds down as well as increasing fertility.
The future forest garden, surrounding the pond, will be planted either this fall or next spring, with more fruit trees, underplanted with shrubs and perennials. We also will have space for annual vegetable production here, and plenty of berries: raspberries, currants, gooseberries, strawberries, and we may try some blueberries.
Jeannie and I will cover crop this area around the pond as soon as we can to keep out the weeds, especially thistles, and to increase nutrient content in the soil. Deano has been hard at work smoothing this spot out into some semblance of a garden, rather than a construction zone.
Back in the greenhouse, we're moving into the summer vegetables now, with some tomatoes, cucumbers, basil, and beans in the raised beds. Other varieties of these warm season annuals remain as seedlings in pots, like the peppers, eggplants, and of course, more basil and tomatoes.
